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Murderbot
- Thread starter maihan
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I don’t have so much of a problem with the theme but come on… 23 minutes? Really? This latest episode was only 23 freaking minutes. How utterly ridiculous. There was a time when weekly TV shows were either 30 min or an hour, and the season usually had 30 plus episodes. But not on Apple. You’re lucky if you get 8 episodes in a season, but this continuing cut is what’s causing me to just give up on Apple TV and save my money. It’s just not worth the money.
Get the frustration. The 23-minute runtime threw me off as well. Just as it starts to get interesting, the credits roll. I like the concept, but it feels like they’re just dragging it out over a tiny runtime to stretch the season. It’s hard to stay invested when it barely feels like an episode.
Well said. I feel likewise with, “It’s hard to stay invested when it barely feels like an episode.”
Same here - I want to like it (I quite enjoyed the book) but it's not floating my boat and the short episodes are part of the problem.
I think the issue is that they want to run it for 8-10 weeks but don't have enough material for 8-10 hours of TV - the source, "All Systems Red" is only a novella. They could have got through 2-3 of the novellas in a full season.
They still don't seem to have got the hang of pacing for these book-to-long-form-TV adaptations. That was the main flaw with the otherwise-excellent Expanse and why I gave up on Silo when they still hadn't finished volume one (of the 3-novel version) several episodes into season 2.
It's great not to have a 600-page novel compressed into a 100-minute film, or a simple story arc padded out over 24 episodes of filler... but I don't think they've quite found the sweet spot yet.
For anybody who hasn't started it yet - wait a couple more weeks until all the episodes are up so you can watch it in decent-sized sessions.
NB: I've also started watching Resident Alien on Netflix and... is it just me or are there uncanny similarities between the two, despite superficially completely different settings & concepts?
I remember when a 30-minute TV show was 5 minutes of ads and 25 minutes of show. That quickly changed to 10 and 20. Today, some are 12 minutes of ads and a mere 18 minutes of show. For the few services I subscribe to, it is the higher-priced ad-free versions only. At least for now.
I may have to dust off and reconnect my TiVo units.
I’ve been listening to the series on Audible about halfway through, saw this show but no mention of the book author. Does it follow the book series?
The trend of having 10 episodes per season disturbs me. There were roughly 26 episodes person season in many of the Star Trek shows just as one example. After 7 seasons of 26 episodes you feel like you really know the characters.
I wonder with this new trend if that kind of depth is gone.
Yes, as far as I remember. The first was just a taster but the follow on books had much more content. I don't recall there being so much touchy-feely emotions from the support characters in the first book.
In the specific case of Murderbot - it's based on a series of half-a-dozen short novellas so a season 26 40+ minute episodes would probably have burned up all of the available material... A season of 10 20-min episodes was more than enough to cover the first story - the problem was the short weekly episodes, it would have been much better to release them in one go so people could have binged them 2-3 at a time.
For other shows, the flipside of the 10 (or 8)-episode season is movie-grade production values and more long-form story telling. Your typical 26-ep-season show went hand-in-hand with the need for the episodes to work in any order, so we got the infamous plot reset button at the end of every episode. Even shows like Babylon 5, Buffy and 2000s Battlestar Galactica which (between them) popularised the season- or show- long story arc ended up with a lot of "filler" episodes and had to drip the story arc in very slowly. Also, bear in mind that some streaming shows have longer, even variable, episode run times than old school network shows.
The problem is the common 2-3 year wait between "seasons" especially when the "season" only lasted for a couple of months. I know we've had Covid and a writers strike, but it was already heading that way. Must make it nigh-impossible to keep the cast and crew together - and poison for more complex stories where viewers have forgotten what happened by the time season 2 comes along. Horrible when they keep a cliffhanger hanging that long. Makes watching shows a bit binary: either you love it enough to re-watch the first season just before the new one comes out, or you don't, and never get round to watching season 2.
Not sure how Slow Horses (probably the best thing on Apple TV) got around that - they seem to be knocking out a season a year (the author of the novels better get his skates on or they're gonna pull a Game of Thrones!) I know it's not SF/fantasy so it doesn't spend a year in post-production but it certainly doesn't look cheap.
I thought it was fun and I liked the short episodes. I watched it as it came out and I like the week break between shows. I've never heard of it before the show.
I think the point of the earlier episodes was for the viewers to see the crew through Murderbot's eyes, they're supposed to be insufferable. It wasn't until later after both Murderbot as well as the supporting characters developed, that they finally grew on him and he see them as family. I personally liked it.